Darran Anderson

Mesmerising exploration of cities that exist mostly as concepts and designs and mad flights of fancy, and through this an eclectic trip around various historical, cultural and political nuggets, some obscure, some forgotten. It has about three pages on Mega City One from 2000AD, so that's where we're at. Dystopias and utopias and everything in between. Hugely readable and utterly fascinating.

I really liked the concept of this book but, in retrospect, should perhaps have been suspicious of its grand ambitions. The blurb claims that it, 'rethinks ideas of utopia and dystopia' and 'seeks to move beyond the clichés of psychogeography and hauntology'. The fact of the matter is, I got 164 pages in and not a single chapter was longer than five pages. Indeed, most were a mere three pages long. Each chucked a couple of vaguely worded ideas about cities at the reader, supported by show more several quotes and a single footnote, then flitted onto the next thing. This is not what I want from non-fiction. I could discern no thesis, no structuring idea(s), and no direction in which the author was heading. Yet somehow there were more than five hundred more pages left. Also, it's due back at the library tomorrow.

I always feel guilty about 'abandoning' books, especially if they might potentially have some interest should I persist. However, as my mother said, I should see it more positively as moving on to a more engaging book. I was reminded of the 700 page [b:100 Selected Stories|863761|100 Selected Stories (Wordsworth Classics)|O. Henry|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1415589508s/863761.jpg|849182] O Henry collection that I gave up on halfway through because 100 short stories is simply too many. The reader gets lost and bewildered by such a density of disconnected fragments. This strikes me as even more of a problem in a non-fiction book. Adorno got away with it in [b:Minima Moralia|201388|Minima Moralia|Theodor W. Adorno|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388215583s/201388.jpg|313155] because his fragments were succinctly insightful, as well as longer than five pages for the most part. 'Imaginary Cities' has no clear idea of what it is trying to do or say; a forest of literary, historical, and academic references cannot make up for this lack. show less

I really, really wish I didn't have to write this - I wanted so much to like it and everything about it should be something I like - but despite an absolutely fascinating premise, this book falls flat in its attempt to...well, I'm not sure. The semblances of topic sentences are absent from everywhere. The book follows a vague progression of meandering subjects, perhaps illuminating connections but more often than not merely appearing one after the other in a grouping of quasi-similar show more areas.

Darren Anderson curates a very interesting Twitter feed called Oniropolis, each tweet (or thread) of which usually features a collection of images from a given source or artist or city. It's simple, thought-provoking, and very well-spotted. Unfortunately, this book exists almost as a prose version of the same. Anderson flits from one book to a trio of films to the art of a noir painter without describing the works in any meaningful way. But the limitations of print mean that, despite such a visual analysis of the built environment, of art and architecture, it is the words that must suffice in lieu of pictures. But while Anderson's allusions are dense and heavy, they are also fleeting, with a captivating reference to something immediately moved on from, leaving the reader with little grasp of what that reference is or how to learn more about it.

Coming from Anderson's fertile mind, the sheer abundances of sources and references that go unexplained also means that much can escape the reader. For instance:

There are other stories which show us what is to be gained from seeing the city in cross-section; Chris Ware's Building Stories and Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual. Yet this is by no means an intrinsically good thing as the prying protagonist of Barbusse's Hell finds out.

What is the plot in these? The subject? What do they share save a "cross-section" view of the city? Do they even come from a common period? With this book, you're left wanting for detail, the cumulus clouds of the word tags floating far overhead, casting only a shadow. This isn't to say that the book isn't interesting; indeed, these frustrations are so precisely because one would like to know more about the referred-to material. But in the absence of that detail - or, as I'll address, an easy means of finding it - Imaginary Cities confounds as often as it provokes.

I've saved the most pedantic for last, but the citation structure in Imaginary Cities is lamentable. It's astonishing that the University of Chicago Press, inventors of the ur-standard for citation formatting, seems to have skipped editing this volume entirely. Footnotes follow no given standard; whether or not they even end with a period is a crapshoot. Sometimes the author is included, sometimes the title, never the date. On occasion, without sufficient reference in the text itself, the footnote won't include anything more than a page number (edition? Publication date? Absent entirely). Half of the most interesting allusions in the text aren't even cited! Quotes from separate volumes will follow each other and yet only one given a partial citation. (And to be even more pedantic, sometimes the citation superscript is properly placed outside of punctuation; more often though, it inexplicable comes before even the period.) In short, as much as this book might prompt broader explorations of the material within, its inadequate references and citations make it difficult to further examine the source material. show less